Projects

A few months ago we completed a piece of work for SEOSS (South East Open Source Solutions) which has been in service and operating without problems since then. The work was a small project, only a week or so, performed at fixed price and on very tight and definite timescales. The project was to deliver software which would support SEOSS on one of their larger projects. The software we developed provided integration facilities for larger systems by reading and processing data to make it available, then removing the data and cleaning up after the data had been used.

SEOSS, as a well-established software company, provided an excellent specification of the work they required and during the work they acted flexibly with us to ensure the entire piece of work stayed on time and to budget. Sometimes we are in the position that we must specify the functionality, technology and design on behalf of a client. During this work it was a refreshing change to have that all done for us by SEOSS.

Our main challenges were meeting the timescales and ensuring we picked up a few of the technologies which were new to us in quick measure so as not to cause any delay. Truth be told, I always consider learning a new technology as one of the really fun parts of the entire job I do. The fun of finding out how a piece of software works, how you can use it and how far you can push it is reminiscent of the feeling of satisfaction I got when learning software for the first time.

The project required Terzo to write a Windows Server service in C#. The service read commands from queues in Redis, executed those commands against a Microsoft SQL Server instance using the SQL Server Management Objects (SMO) automation interface then wrote responses back to the relevant Redis queues. The commands executed were primarily database management commands hence the use of the SMO interface rather than straight SQL, although we did use a mix.

To ensure we could test the entire arrangement of SQL Server, Windows Server with a service and Redis servers without interfering with SEOSS’s servers, we used our own Azure hosted servers for deployment and testing. Once we had proved correct operation the software was made available to SEOSS via a shared Git repository. Terzo also provided full installation and usage instructions.

After a few tweaks to correct small issues which arose and changes in functionality that were requested once the software could be seen in use, we delivered the final software on time and SEOSS report that the software has been performing well since then.

After working with Terzo, Simon Pither of SEOSS said “We had a great experience working with Terzo Digital. They took on a challenging piece of work with very tight timescales and did not disappoint with the quality of their work and their timely delivery.”